Informational Incentives in Congestion Games

We study information disclosure mechanisms about routes' conditions in a simple transportation network. We show that it is not socially optimal to disclosure perfect information about routes’ conditions. The principal can improve the congestion by providing coordinated routing recommendations. When the uncertainty about the routes’ conditions (information value) is high, we show that the socially efficient routing outcome is achievable using a private information disclosure mechanism. We further consider a dynamic two-time step setting assuming different pieces of information that drivers may observe at t=1; we investigate qualitative properties of an optimal dynamic information disclosure mechanism.